Decision making Archives - Fran Moreland Johns

When too much becomes too much, and you just really need to pass

It turns out I’m going to miss the eclipse.

Since the next one will be in 2045, and — at 90 — I have no plans to be around then, I guess I’ll finish life on this planet without having witnessed this extraordinary phenomenon. Which is OK. I’ll watch it on TV, in real time, and that’ll be special.

But being there would be spectacular. It’s the business of how to separate the special from the spectacular, and make rational choices between the two, that gets harder as we humanoids get older.

This is my recent lesson in making such a choice.

It started with an invitation to join a trip arranged by a favorite San Francisco-based organization, the Commonwealth Club , for which I’ve long been (and still am) a volunteer. Small group, brief time, expensive but not break-the-bank expensive, and this would be a once-in-a lifetime event. Another Club member was even looking for a roommate so I’d avoid the single-supplement cost.

The trip was to a south Texas ranch directly in the path of the solar eclipse, pick-up in Dallas on Sunday afternoon, return to DFW Tuesday morning. As just about anyone in the country knows by now, the eclipse will cross the U.S. — its ‘path of totality’ extending from south Texas to Maine — on Monday. I paid the fee and called my travel agent.

Lesson one: Find out travel costs in advance.

SFO to Dallas, how hard could that be? Well, as it turned out the airlines thought about this eclipse, and its path of totality, long before the rest of us did, and adjusted their prices accordingly. Nonstop from SFO to DFW would be roughly an arm and a leg. I gave up flying on anything that stopped between home and destination about the time I turned 70. But after my fearless travel agent ran through the nonstop options and their prices we went quickly, nonstop, to Plan B: find something connecting through weird travel patterns and invoke the Little Old Lady privilege of being met by a wheelchair to make changes in unfamiliar airports.

The LOL wheelchair option is onerous to me. I mean. I walk three or four miles a day, San Francisco hills included, and despite the wrinkled and rumpled appearance validated by my ID I detest being treated as Old Person. But we do what we need to do. Fearless travel agent found flights to DFW through Chicago (Chicago? Yes) returning through Denver, on the same airline for which I had mileage to cover the costs.

This, of course, now made it ridiculous to try going from home to Texas ranch in one day, so I opted to book a hotel at DFW for Saturday night. More added cost, but at least the excursion is less stressful.

Photo by fellow Cloud Appreciation Society Member Bob Osborn

Lesson two: Look at the bigger picture. Seriously. Not just the trip but the peripheral costs, the time involved, other commitments, everything else.

I’d known all along that I had a long-planned trip to the east coast in March. But the eclipse is in April! I’ve traveled for ages to different sites in consecutive months. I’ve been known to take back-to-back trips, often a weekend visit with friends followed by a longer trip just a few days later for a board meeting downstate.

But I’ve also never been 90 before. At some point, the body would like a little time to readjust from timezone changes, crowded airports, strange cities and the stress of it all no matter how much fun it was. The bottom line here was that I got home from the (nonstop) flight, DC to SFO, late Sunday night and the flight out was scheduled for early morning on Saturday. The same week.

By Tuesday, dragging a little, I was scrambling to meet deadlines that had piled up during the east coast trip, and I was beginning to have second thoughts about the eclipse.

Lesson three: Remember that the world doesn’t stop while you’re on vacation.

There was a time — say, back in my 70s or 80s — when I could catch up with the commitments of daily life within a day or two. Something seems to have shifted with that. The brain moves quickly into story deadlines, but the body is still on east coast time and wants a nap. It’s possible to avoid major calamity — postpone stuff that’s not on hard deadline, cancel lunches with friends to gain a little time — but Vacation Recovery is simply not as instantaneous as it was in younger years.

By Wednesday, exhausted, I was having so many second thoughts they were adding up too fast to follow. I began looking at weather reports. Storms and thunderstorms in the south and southwest. A CNN reporter, doing a segment on the eclipse Wednesday night, mentioned weather effects and (I promise, you can’t make this stuff up) ended his piece with a throw-away comment, “Just don’t go to South Texas.”

That did it. Thursday at 3 AM I am wide awake, doing the debate thing in my head: Should I do this thing, or should I not? All that money. But maybe it won’t even be visible. What about stuff I’ve not yet done: cancel the newspapers (yes, I’m a print edition person;) water the plants, buy some bug spray, find the sun hat, confirm the flights, pack another suitcase forheavenssakes.

Lesson four: When you’ve lived this long you’re entitled to change your mind.

Thursday morning I began to think it through. Having no trip insurance — actually, as far as I know there’s no insurance that covers ‘changing your mind’ — I would lose a large chunk of dollars. But travel agent friend assured me she could get back all those United miles, and I still had time to cancel the Saturday night airport hotel.

And the tipping point: If I canceled out I would have four Secret Days. A Secret Day, something that increases in value with every birthday, is one in which everyone thinks you’re gone so you can leave the phone on answering machine and do whatever the heck you want.

I wimped out. Left the carry-on on the shelf where I’d stashed it on Monday, emailed the trip people, apologized to my erstwhile roommate, called the hotel, thanked the travel agent, began to fiddle around with some stories, like this one.

Took a nap.

How old is too old to manage your money? Maybe Brooke Astor’s family could tackle that one. Or a few of the folks who were living comfortably in posh retirement communities last year and now need charity thanks to investments — that seemed just fine at the time — with Bernie Madoff.

True/Slant contributor Ryan Sager has an interesting new post about “The Age of Financial Reason” that caught my eye thanks to its accompanying geezer-photo. (True disclosure: I am not Ryan’s grandmother — though I certainly could be.) He cites an abstract I find fascinating, although I tend to distrust any proclamation that plays fast and loose with phrases like “suboptimal use of credit card balance transfer offers” or misestimentation of ” home value. Did these people ever take regular English? Nevertheless, they are seriously into their study, however convoluted their language. They are concerned about us older adults and our potentially poor financial choices, since it seems “about half the population between ages 80 and 89 either has dementia or a medical diagnosis of ‘cognitive impairment without dementia'”. Good grief.

This is, truth be told, no laughing matter.

You would not want me making your financial choices. Numbers have never been my strong suit. This is despite the fact that I once wrote a pretty good little book titled “Money Management,” part of a 13-volume series designed to reach the functionally illiterate adult population (I was the creative part; co-author LuEllen Ransbottom was the brains.) What I did really smart was to marry Bud Johns; you should be so lucky as to have Bud make your financial choices.

But the point is, few of us can really predict when our sharp brains might slip right into that ‘cognitive impairment without dementia’ gray area. And the further point is, as noted in Ryan’s post, there is a limit to which government should not go in removing one’s control of one’s financial choices — at least, the financial choices we have left over after taxes.

Many of us geezers are less than pleased about the fact that careful choices past — such as optimization of credit cards, i.e. religiously paying balances on time; credit companies hate people like us — carrying only reasonable mortgages or other debt, investing in properly run, socially responsible companies — many who practiced fiscal responsibility (except Bud and I both, separately, did invest in Smith Corona just for old times sake) have found themselves penalized by measures taken to avert disasters brought on by the fiscally irresponsible.

What’s a body to do? I agree that families need to maintain awareness, at whatever age, of the financial choices being made by themselves and their loved ones. If they’ve had long-term investments with good investment companies or advisors, chances are those companies or advisors will not lead them astray. When checking out those links from Ryan’s blog, and a few dozen others on reputable senior and financial sites, I also found a zillion agencies out there eager to help. It is likely that the ones with .org after their names rather than .com might be preferable.

In a recent post I talked about the emergence of brain exercise, and its small promise for postponing ‘cognitive impairment without dementia’ (I’m beginning to detest that phrase.) For example: say six numbers out loud. Now say them backwards. You have exercised your brain. In an effort to forestall poor financial decision making, for the time being I plan to do my brain exercises. And leave the decisions to Bud.

Tag: Decision making

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